Na (natali-té-morte)

[2002, choreography, 3 minutes]

Na is a short work about deconstruction and syllables. It was created from a text containing thirty syllables, each of which was assigned a movement that, strung together, create a movement sequence. When performing the work, Line Nault first travels through the space in a straight line. She then retraces her journey, this time cutting syllables from the spoken text. Each time it is done, this process redefines the meaning of the text and changes the movement sequence, passing from 30 syllables to 15, 10, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, and finally one syllable (the “na” – in French, the first speech sound that a baby uses to express the negative), to strip away from what was the original, both at the level of the text and the movement, and to draw out new meaning.